[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / NASA, JPL-Caltech; Mosaic Processing: Marco Di Lorenzo, Kenneth Kremer] Shortly before Mars’ June 2015 conjunction, the Curiosity Rover celebrated 1000 sols on the red planet. After its Aug. 5, 2012 landing, Curiosity’s 1000th sol or martian day on the surface corresponded to planet Earth’s calendar date May 31, […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Left Image: Damia Bouic; Right Image: NASA, JPL-Caltech] How different does sunset appear from Mars than from Earth? For comparison, two images of our common star were taken at sunset, one from Earth and one from Mars. These images were scaled to have same angular width and featured here […]
Early on a Saturday morning, about 60 planetary malcontents gathered in a narrow auditorium on the campus of George Washington University. They’d come to hear about a plan to build a self-sustaining colony in space, and they hoped to be among its first settlers, leaving the rest of us to live and die on Earth. […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA] It was late in the northern martian spring when the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spied this local denizen. Tracking across the flat, dust-covered Amazonis Planitia in 2012, the core of this whirling dust devil is about 140 meters in diameter. […]
[CLICK IN IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Kevin Bourque] Venus, named for the Roman goddess of love, and Mars, the war god’s namesake, came together by moonlight in this lovely skyview, recorded on Feb. 20 from Charleston, South Carolina, USA, planet Earth. Made in twilight with a digital camera, the three second time exposure also records […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS How did these Martian rocks form? As the robotic Curiosity rover has approached Pahrump Hills on Mars, it has seen an interesting and textured landscape dotted by some unusual rocks. The featured image shows a curiously round rock spanning about two centimeters across. Seemingly a […]
Mars, Earth, and the Sun [were to have aligned last night], a rare ‘opposition of the planets’ that only happens once every 778 days. But what makes this so remarkable is that it comes precisely a week before everyone on earth will see the first of FOUR dark red ‘blood moons’, an extraordinary event some […]
What created this unusual hole in Mars? The hole was discovered by chance in 2011 on images of the dusty slopes of Mars’ Pavonis Mons volcano taken by the HiRISE instrument aboard the robotic Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter currently circling Mars. The hole appears to be an opening to an underground cavern, partly illuminated on […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Mars Exploration Rover Mission, Texas A&M, Cornell, JPL, NASA] What would it be like to see a sunset on Mars? To help find out, the robotic rover Spirit was deployed in 2005 to park and watch the Sun dip serenely below the distant lip of Gusev crater. … Fine […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS; Digital processing: Damia Bouic] Landing in mid-2012, the Curiosity rover is searching for clues of whether life could ever have existed on the red planet [and has found] evidence for an ancient (but now dried) freshwater lake…. To continue its investigation, the car-sized rover is […]
